High-quality assessments are crucial to many aspects of the educational process. They can help policymakers monitor long-term educational trends, assist state educational agencies (SEAs) and local educational agencies (LEAs) in allocating resources and professional development opportunities, provide insights to teachers about how well students…

This is the first book to gather and address what we have learned about the impacts and challenges of data-intensive teacher evaluation systems--a defining characteristic of the current education policy landscape. Expert researchers and practitioners speak to what we know (and what remains to be known) about evaluation measures themselves, the…

Although International Association for the Evaluation of Educational Achievement-pioneered international large-scale assessment (ILSA) of education is now a well-established science, non-practitioners and many users often substantially misunderstand how large-scale assessments are conducted, what questions and challenges they are designed to…

The Guidelines for Good Practice of the European Association for Language Testing and Assessment (EALTA) stress the importance of collaboration between all parties involved in the process of developing instruments, activities and programmes for testing and assessment. Collaboration is considered to be as important as validity and reliability,…

The importance of student assessment, particularly for summative purposes, has increased greatly over the past thirty years. At the same time, emphasis on including all students in assessment programs has also increased. Assessment programs, whether they are large-scale, district-based, or teacher developed, have traditionally attempted to assess…

This collection consists of six papers, each dealing with some aspects of reliability and performance testing. Each paper has an abstract, and each contains its own references. Papers include: (1) "Using Reliabilities To Make Decisions" (Deborah J. Harris); (2) "Conditional Standard Errors, Reliability, and Decision Consistency…

Of the 15 substantive papers in this report, 12 focus on the use of the Kent Infant Development (KID) Scale with severely handicapped children. The KID Scale measures 252 behaviors usually developed during the first year of life in five domains (cognitive, motor, language, self-help, and social). It was successfully adapted to elicit reliable…

Two articles discuss the controversy about the relationship between reliability and the power of significance tests in response to the discussion of Donald W. Zimmerman, Richard H. Williams, and Bruno D. Zumbo. Lloyd G. Humphreys emphasizes the differences between what statisticians can do and constraints on researchers. Zimmerman, Williams, and…

These studies in test adequacy focus on two problems: procedures for estimating reliability, and techniques for identifying ineffective distractors. Fourteen papers are presented on recent advances in measuring achievement (a response to Molenaar); "an extension of the Dirichlet-multinomial model that allows true score and guessing to be…

This collection contains four papers that were presented as part of a short course delivered at the 1991 annual meeting of the Speech Communication Association. The papers discuss various aspects of the development and use of "The Competent Speaker," a public speaking assessment instrument designed for the college sophomore level. The papers and…

Increased demands for colleges and universities to engage in outcomes assessment for accountability purposes have accelerated the need to bridge the gap between higher education practice and the fields of measurement, assessment, and evaluation. The "Handbook on Measurement, Assessment, and Evaluation in Higher Education" provides higher…

This book addresses some of the important considerations surrounding the use of tests and assessment procedures when applied to students who are culturally, linguistically, and/or socioeconomically different from mainstream North Americans. Chapter 1 introduces the problems of using standards based on a white Anglo-Saxon perspective to assess and…

The major purpose of the second field test of the AEL MSCI instrument was to assess the psychometric properties of the refined version with a larger, more diverse group of respondents. The first objective of this field test was to expand the four-point Likert-type response scale to six points in order to yield more variance in responses. The…

This issue of a journal devoted primarily to teaching English as a second language to engineering students contains the following articles: (1) "The Contribution of Educational Technology to ELT [English Language Teaching]" by Mike Laflin; (2) "Looking Again at Student-Centred Study Skills" by Andrew E. Seymour; (3)…

Three papers address issues in course evaluation and assessment of student performance in language awareness programs. The first paper concentrates on the formative evaluation of a course, during its design phase or in progress. It focuses on self-evaluation and two features of course design considered essential to course integrity: explicitness…